Computers and other related technology pervade modern business enterprises as well as other organizations. Businesses utilize computers to improve the productivity of their employees and manage operations. Today businesses rely on a plurality of performance data derived from enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as spreadsheets and other data files. Unfortunately, each system defines and presents data in a different manner. Moreover, each system provides information on different aspects of a business operation. Hence, business professionals must expend a large amount of time and energy to consolidate and digest great quantities of data to determine what is important to its business and its future goals. Key performance indicators can facilitate providing a business decision maker with a consolidated understanding of company performance. This allows executives and decision makers to keep track of the pulse of business and act quickly to take advantage of opportunities to propel business forward toward established goals and objectives
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are customizable business metrics utilized to visualize status and trends in an organization. Once a business or other organization defines its mission or objectives, KPIs can be employed to measure progress toward those objectives. In general, each KPI can have a target value and an actual value. The target value represents a quantitative goal or object that is considered key or critical to the success of a business or organization. Thus target values can be quite different for distinct businesses as their goals and focus are often dissimilar. For example, business can have KPIs concerning sales, net profit, and debt ratio, while a school may define a KPI related to graduation rate. Of course, the target value can change over time but is for the most part a stable value. The actual value is the value that fluctuates often based on the actions and performance of a business. Actual values can be compared to target values to determine a business' health or progress toward the target value. Thus KPIs are advantageous in that they provide a clear description of organizational goals and distill vast quantities of data down to a single value that can be utilized to continuously monitor business performance and its progress toward organization benchmarks. However, it should be noted that KPIs can be helpful in organization management as long as the KPIs reflect critical success factors and the KPIs can be measured consistently with accuracy.
KPIs and scorecards (groups of KPIs) are not a novel business concept. Business decision makers have been utilizing KPIs for some time now to measure the health of their business. However, problems with KPIs have been identified in practice. In particular, different decision makers at different levels have been known to identify different key performance indicators. Thus, there has been inconsistency in the definition of organizational goals and objectives and hence key performance indicators. Additionally, even when decision makers agree upon a particular KPI, each decision maker could and often would calculate the KPI differently. Furthermore, conventional architectures are inefficient in that each decision maker identifies and defines KPIs as well as submits multiple queries to databases to retrieve the desired result. As a consequence, this also restricts the type of device that can receive KPIs, namely to larger computers (e.g., desktop, laptop, server . . . ) with the ability to query databases. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a centralized KPI system that provides a flexible and unified view of key performance metrics that can be easily accessed from a plurality of computing devices.